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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 662 posts.
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Withnail's Coat and I
He may have had tailoring from Hawkes of Savile Row, but Withnail’s coat has a more complicated history.
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Men who stare at walls
I came across a video by Simple Lucas describing a routine to improve focus and productivity. The routine was basically: Don’t use any screens/entertainment when trying to focus on work. When you start to feel mentally drained, sit and stare at a wall for x minutes to recover focus. I’ve been trying it, and it’s a…
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It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)
In an industry that pressures developers to always be shipping side-projects, it can be helpful to be retrospective with the projects that don't make the cut
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I have officially retired from Emacs
This past Tuesday I typed C-x C-c in Emacs for the last time after 20 years of daily use. Though nearly half that time was gradually retiring it, switching to modal editing, then to Vim. Emacs is a platform, and I’d grown accustomed to its applications, especially those I built myself. There was no particular hurry…
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When the cheap one is the cool one
Apple and Porsche both figured out the same secret that the cheapest product in the lineup can be the most exciting. It just takes a little intention.
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How I leared what a decoupling capacitor is for, the hard way
I was very excited to get the latest version of my PCB from the manufacturer.
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Three constraints before I build anything
['Programmer', 'Computer nerd', 'Unix enthusiast'];
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Why I Write (1946)
"What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice."
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Magic: The Gathering took me from N2 to Japanese fluency
Passing the JLPT N2 is one thing, but actively managing projects in Japanese is another. This is how I used Magic: The Gathering to bridge the gap from academic study to professional confidence in Tokyo.
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Using the internet like it's 1999
A blog, notes, gallery, lifestyle and fully conglomerated posts from Joshua.
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My phone replaced a brass plug
Porting a 2012 OpenCV paper to YOLOv8 and CoreML on iOS to score rifle shooting targets from a photo - replacing the brass-plug scoring gauge with on-device computer vision.
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The Joy of Folding Bikes
I was chatting to a friend about my folding bike and I had the urge to write about it - because this falls in the category of “Things I wish I’d had decades ago”. And maybe I can encourage some others to try these wonderful devices. Note: I’m 3 months into a new job so blogging has taken a back seat to drinking from a…
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Another Day Has Come
If you agree that Apple itself was It’s hard to imagine a more orderly, confidence-inspiring, exciting-but-not-at-all-surprising, this-feels-right way to do this.
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Work with the garage door up (2024)
One of my favorite ways that creative people communicate is by “working with their garage door up,” to riff on a passage from Robin Sloan (below). This is the opposite of the Twitter account which mostly posts announcements of finished work: it’s Screenshot Saturday ; it’s giving a lecture about the problems you’re…
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The Beauty of Bonsai Styles
The way in which a tree grows is often determined by their environment, and as a bonsai artist, I look to honor that environment, and the way in which that tree would grow in nature, when determining how to shape and style a bonsai.
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Books are not too expensive
Let’s Explore a Little Math
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The purist's guide to phở in Hanoi
A tribute not only to phở in the capital of Vietnam, but also to three extraordinary writers who wrote about it with wit, nostalgia, and devotion: Thạch Lam, Vũ Bằng, and Nguyễn Tuân.
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A Brief History of Fish Sauce
A brief history of fish sauce, from Ancient Asian recipes, Roman times, and through to today's many (delicious) uses.
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I learned Unity the wrong way
I spent 3 years building Unity games by copying tutorials and stitching forum scripts together. Then an interviewer asked me what Queue<T> was. I could not answer.
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It's cool to care (2025)
Caring deeply – about art, my friends, and shared experiences – has brought me so much joy.
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God sleeps in the minerals
I took this snapshot, and the rest of them, at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County’s Unearthed: Raw Beauty exhibition yesterday. Enjoy.
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Good sleep, good learning, good life (2012)
The good educator insists on exercise, play, and plentiful sleep: "the great cordial of nature."
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How can I keep from singing?
This is a story of a most unexpected journey — one that is just starting. If somebody had told me four years ago that I’d be writing this today, I would have stared at them in astonishment or laughed dismissedly. Yet here I am, writing about a late-found hobby that has somehow become a very important part of my life.
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The peril of laziness lost
In his classic Programming Perl — affectionately known to a generation of technologists as "the Camel Book" — Larry Wall famously wrote of the three virtues of a programmer as laziness, impatience, and hubris:
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DIY Soft Drinks
Cola, orange soda, and almond soda!
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Fixing a monitor that goes black, off or blinks due to static electricity (2023)
If you often get static electricity shocks when touching your laptop or your office chair, or your monitor goes black when you stand up, this may interest you.
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Introduction to Obsidian
An introduction to Obsidian. Why you should use it, how to keep it simple, and how you can use it.
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Now is the best time to write code by hand
As more engineers use the irresistible LLMs their skills atrophy, practicing will make you special.